Dropbox Trick: Making the default Mac screenshots instantly live on the web

I have a little trick I use with the program Dropbox that I thought I would share. This came about after some discussion on Twitter about how some of us use Dropbox, and this was obviously more than 140 characters.

Note that I am on a Mac, so you Windows users will have to figure out how to do this on your own, though I suspect it won’t be too different really.

By default, Macs are able to take screenshots in a few ways. Full screen grabs, selected areas and selected windows can all be quickly snapped and saved as an image file to the desktop. Default filetype is PNG, which works fine for me. But I found that I often take screenshots that I need to share with someone. Doing the sharing part required several more steps.

In comes Dropbox. Dropbox has a public folder in it, that makes any file inside of it instantly viewable on the web. Each file gets a special web address, on my Mac I get it by right clicking the file and selecting Dropbox > Copy Public Link.

But first we need to change where the Mac puts screenshots. To do this, I run a little app called Deeper. Deeper lets you change certain defaults rather than having to dig into the command line (scary!). So now I just set my default screenshot location to a new folder inside Dropbox’s public folder called Screenshots (amazing, I know).

Now whenever I take a screenshot, it is stored into a public Dropbox folder. I can easily and quickly share an image via Twitter, IM, email or whatever. It’s become so useful to me that I can’t imagine working without this. Discussions over IM about a design, or troubleshooting something are now really easy to do.

Need to change the default screenshot filetype and don’t want to grab Deeper? Change JPEG below to whatever filetype you need.

Open up a Terminal and type:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleScreenShotFormat JPEG

Jing and Dropbox

Just a quick tip here. Jing is out of beta now and a free download. It’s a slick app, with some nice customization possibilities. If you are also using Dropbox (and you really should be), here is a neat way to make your screenshots quickly usable.

In the Public folder of your Dropbox, make a new folder called Screenshots (or whatever you want). Add a file here, anything really. We’ll need this for later.

Then open up Jing and in the preferences, select Customize Jing Buttons. Now select your Save button. Under Save Location, find your new Public Dropbox folder we created above. Then in Clipboard contents, select Custom Code.

Now go back to your folder and the file you added. Right click this file and find Dropbox… Copy Public Link. With that in your clipboard, go back to the Custom image code box in Jing.

Paste your text into the box. It will be a URL. Delete the filename from the end and add [filename] instead. Save this.

Now you should be ready to go. Test it out by taking a screenshot with Jing, and saving it. It should now automatically add the public URL to the file, ready for you to paste into wherever you need it.

Excellent!